Robert Boswell recommends I Have Her Memories Now, by Carrie Grinstead (Howling Bird Press, 2022); and It Falls Gently All Around, by Ramona Reeves (University of Pittsburg Press, 2022): “Two new story collections by remarkable young writers.” Peter Ho Davies recommends Who You Might Be, by Leigh N. Gallagher (Henry Holt and Co., 2022): “A…
Ploughshares is pleased to present Christie Hodgen with the fourth annual Ashley Leigh Bourne Prize for Fiction for her short story “Bush v. Gore,” which appeared in the Fall 2021 issue, edited by Editor-in-chief Ladette Randolph. The $2,500 prize, sponsored by longtime patron Hunter C. Bourne III and selected by our editors, honors a short…
In his essay “Cante Moro,” Nathaniel Mackey describes a kind of singing that has “a sound of trouble in the voice. The voice becomes troubled.” The quality he identifies here, via the Spanish poet Federico García Lorca, “is something beyond technical competence or even technical virtuosity. It is something troubling. It has to do with…
1. I couldn’t tell you what we saw in Tod O’Neil, or what we feared. Maybe it was a matter of timing: Tod had that lion-tamer’s knack for knowing just when to crack the whip, a blunt force of personality with which he kept his friends in line. Not that we were his “friends,” exactly—we…
Silence. Being silenced is a common experience for people with disabilities. Society is uncomfortable with our voices, which are regarded as unwieldy, awkward, too loud, too quiet, too scary, or strange. When we are allowed to speak, others want to control the narrative. They want to read a story or poem that explains the difficulties…
Ploughshares is pleased to present Fei Sun with the eleventh annual Alice Hoffman Prize for Fiction for her story “Half Bowl of Mengpo’s Soup,” which appeared in the Winter 2021-22 Issue of Ploughshares, edited by Editor-in-chief Ladette Randolph and Poetry Editor John Skoyles. The $2,500 prize, sponsored by acclaimed writer, former guest editor, longtime patron,…
Lan Samantha Chang, The Family Chao (W. W. Norton, February 2022) Lloyd Schwartz, Who’s on First?: New and Selected Poems (University of Chicago Press, 2021) Maura Stanton, Interiors (Finishing Line Press, 2022)
DeWitt Henry recommends Contributions to Literature: A Tribute to Small Press Books by Jack Smith (Serving House Books, 2021). “Jack Smith—literary editor, novelist, critic, and philosophy teacher—recommends a league of his own, one in which I am proud to be included. Much as there was no ‘great tradition’ before the critic F. R. Leavis invented one, so here Smith…
Time doesn’t move, we move, says Tolstoy, but I am standing still in a trolley as it moves through a provincial city in the USSR—a country that no longer exists—in which two old ladies, who look just like my deceased mother, are speaking a strange mash-up of Yiddish, Ukrainian, Russian (and another language I cannot…
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